


you must like me for me

by Nyxierose



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Cross-Posted on Tumblr, F/M, Ficlet Collection
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-13 12:35:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29526474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nyxierose/pseuds/Nyxierose
Summary: Assorted prompt fills and other short ficlets, cross-posted from tumblr. Generally unconnected and post-canon.
Relationships: Chris Argent/Melissa McCall
Kudos: 4





	1. until something burns

**Author's Note:**

> Welp, here we are with a cute canon rarepair from a show that ended a while back... I love these two as individuals and the show left them in a good place so here goes some exploring. Title from "Delicate" by Taylor Swift because I am a cliche. All of these are at least partially on my tumblr @electricbluebutterflies, so if y'all have prompts for these babes, go talk at me there!

As a young girl, Melissa tried to make friends with the neighborhood stray cats, as one does when nine years old and living in the shadow of a sibling. The cats, some born feral and others left behind when people didn’t feel like moving a feline cross-country, had a certain unquestioning loyalty to them along with their mean streaks. Dangerous to love but worth trying anyways.

Decades later, as she paces her kitchen and reminds herself that yelling never solved any problem with a man, she can’t help but think she’s never learned how to love anything differently.

Chris is the sort of man who, on paper, Has Potential. Flawed but salvageable. Doesn’t have any traits that has definitely-for-fact made Melissa’s life miserable when manifested in a different body, which is great except that every time things have gone downhill for her has been a new one. She has weaknesses but there’s always a new shiny mistake to make, always a new way to make herself bleed, always-

“You can stop looking at me like that,” she mutters. Her own eyes are locked on the floor beneath her feet, one two three four turn because she’s feeling the dangerous kind of reckless, but she can feel his starlight blue puppy-eyes fixating on her, a break in his normally flawless façade. This is how this particular man exists after a fight, and four months after she took him into her bed she’s finally getting used to it.

“You don’t have to be so kind,” he counters. She likes listening to him talk, his voice low like a river, like he doesn’t know the power he is. They’re too similar, she thinks, two people who are both too good at focusing on making other people happy thrown together and forced to figure out how to love when neither of them has a dominant cell in their bodies. She’d like to wring the neck of anybody who claims egalitarian relationships are easy, because this is decidedly _not_.

“Kind,” she repeats like it’s a bitter insult. Might as well be, the way he’s reacting to her attempts at basic human decency. All she did was suggest maybe he could stay here a little more permanently. How the hell was she to know that would push him into shutdown? They’re still new, and while she’s well aware his baggage makes hers look like a carry-on, that doesn’t mean she’s seen the whole internal suitcase yet.

“You are aware that normal people move in with each other when their relationship is a certain level of serious,” Melissa continues, apparently determined to light matches until something burns. “We’re co-parenting… I’m not even sure how many kids we have anymore, so I think we’ve blown past that.”

“Normal for you,” he counters. This is good, this is existent backbone, he didn’t have anything close to it a year ago that night she needed to finish a bottle of wine and they went from acquaintances to something almost like friends. “But I’m not.”

Yes, and this is why I’ve told my kid he needs to drag your ass to a therapist, Melissa wants to say. But she doesn’t, because that gets unnecessarily personal and also she wants to be a fly on the wall when some poor shrink first hears about the whole murder cult thing. Which she realizes is a simplification, but nor is it wrong, and-

“You could fucking try,” she hisses. “I am giving you space here. I want you to be able to-“

“You’re trying to fix me,” he corrects. “You don’t need to. I’m not broken.”

Like hell. Three years he’s been in her orbit, she wants to say, three years and she has been on the far sidelines as every goddamn thing he was when they first met has been brutally ripped away from him. And he is no phoenix, she has learned that as they’ve gotten closer. Not one to dust the ashes off on his own. Content to drown if unsupervised.

She thought she could be good for him. Thought she could help him find that sense of normal he so desperately needs. Thought, on her good days, she could become his new north star. Maybe she was wrong.

“I didn’t mean broken. I just… this is different. _We_ are different.”

She looks up and takes in the broken man standing there with his back against her refrigerator. He belongs here, she thinks, fits in perfect amidst all the other chaos she lives in and loves. She couldn’t imagine anyone else making a nest in this house, with this particular misfit family they share. She can’t let this go without a better fight.

“What if different is too much?” Chris murmurs, like the words are too much for him to think let alone say.

“Then we deescalate. I didn’t… Not Yet is an option, you could’ve just said that in the fucking first place and I would’ve-“

“I don’t want to disappoint you like that.”

Yeah, because actually saying he’s not ready for full domestic entanglement would _clearly_ break her heart so much more than the spiral they’ve ended up in because he avoids conflict with a determination unlike any other man she’s ever known. Cute.

“I want you to be happy,” she counters. “With or without me, however the hell this ends up working out. I’m not self-absorbed enough to make you bleed for my pleasure, okay? I’m not… I’m not…”

Melissa stops her pacing, turns her body and locks eyes with her partner. I’m not _her_ , she wants to scream. I’m not your scary bitch of a three-years-dead wife. But that too, like so much in her heart right now, is too mean for this fragile moment.

“Fine.” He doesn’t look like he means it, looks instead like he’d say anything if it would make her shut up. “Not yet. Happy?”

She takes two steps forward, steadies her body in the middle of the kitchen floor. She wants to close the distance entirely, pull him down for kisses until she forgets why he irritated her so bad, but that won’t help. Physical intimacy, as good as it is with this man, will not solve any problems better than hesitant words.

“We’ll figure this out,” she says after a too-long silence. “Hell, maybe we _are_ rushing into everything. That’s how my first marriage went wrong, maybe this is-“

“I’m not him.”

And there’s the other elephant in the room, the thing Melissa compartmentalizes so easily because she cannot accept it. Yes, she has a type. Yes, show her a dangerous man who looks at her like she’s half-pretty and she’ll fall in love too easy and too hard, and yes, Chris has checked off all her boxes. The difference with him is he’s honorable like none of her other mistakes ever even tried to be. Maybe, in the grand scheme of it all, that will be why he _isn’t_ a mistake. Right now it’s just enough to make her try harder.

“I know. You’re good people.”

“I’m not-“

“Can you shut up for thirty seconds and let me try to fix this?”

He nods, gracious as ever.

“I know I’m not…” She takes a few breaths, tries to arrange her thoughts in a coherent line before it all falls out of her mouth. “I don’t trust easily. And I don’t ask for much. And when I said I want you here more, I meant… I like when you stay, I like when you’re the first thing I see when I wake up, I’d like to be warm like that on nights we don’t fuck and nights there aren’t unidentified monsters roaming the county. I like you as a human being, okay? This is not me trying to change who you are, this is me saying… you could be that here. Be warm. With me.”

He is so trained to be stoic at all times, she is aware and appreciative of this, but still she sees the tiniest break in his composure. Just a heartbeat, and then he’s perfect again. “Alright.”

“You can think about it. I’m not asking you to move all your shit into the garage this weekend – actually we’d need to get a shed, you know how I feel about anything bigger or more complicated than a pistol in the house – I’m just saying… eventually. If you wanted.”

“Eventually,” he repeats, for once like it’s sweet. “No… no timeline?”

“Whenever you’re ready. And if you never are… I still want you however you’re willing, okay?”

Now, now she can take kisses. Now she can taste the sweet-sadness of him, broken man who is _trying_ and who will try harder for her even if she never asks. It’ll be alright, she knows as he holds her and gets a callused hand up in her mess of hair. They’ll always be alright.

“If that’s what you want,” he breathes against her mouth.

She takes another kiss. Yes. A hundred times yes.


	2. enough to follow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "wanna dance?"
> 
> Set roughly where 3B is, but ignoring most of 3B...

Hell is real, Melissa thinks. Hell is real and it looks like a high school gym, creatively decorated on a budget even tighter than her own. She’d bet most of the snowflakes started out as printer paper, and they look… well… she’s pretty sure whichever kid made them has never actually seen snow in real life, but an effort was made. That would be the polite way to describe all of this. Someone tried. Maybe.

The precariously dangling paper snowflake above her head is a nice reminder of her own situation here. She tries, to the extent that a single mother of a disaster-prone teenage boy can. Tonight that means she is chaperoning winter formal, because apparently the school needed more adult bodies than usual for some unknown reason that probably has nothing to do with the supernatural and she in turn is trying to get better at keeping an eye on situations before they put her in harm’s way. The most significant downside of knowing about the wild world is knowing her place in it – innocent human woman, most likely to end up as collateral damage. Well, she’d at least like to know what gets her before it-

“Mind if I stand here?”

Melissa turns towards the sound of a familiar voice and y’know, scratch that, she may not be the person having the worst time here after all.

It takes her a frustratingly long moment to place that no, the annoyingly attractive bad idea now standing within arm’s reach is _not_ someone she’s been on a bad second date with. Oh no, that would at least be easier than dealing with… her kid’s sort-of-ex’s tragedy-prone remaining parent? Melissa isn’t sure what label to apply to any of that, thank you very much, and even less sure how this poor man got coerced into supervising here. Fine, she’s had less direct interactions with him than she could count on her hands so _maybe_ she’s wrong about his personality type, but from what she does know, Chris Argent does not seem like somebody who responds politely (or at all) to PTA emails. Yet here he is, about as cleaned-up as she imagines he can get and not even trying to hide how much he does not want to be here right now.

“So how did the kids talk you into this?” she asks, because that’s the best explanation she can come up with.

“They didn’t. I just thought… whatever happens next, this would be an ideal time and place for it.”

Yep, and in that case she would love to watch him walk through a metal detector. Of course there’s that motivation. There are probably items somewhere on his person, in internal jacket pockets or god-knows-where, that she has never heard of. Now is not a good time to remember the last time they were in the same space, the rush she couldn’t stop herself from feeling as she saw exactly how many weapons had to get peeled off an unconscious man and-

“It’s winter formal, not a funeral,” she says too quickly and then processes her tactlessness. “I meant…”

“You’re fine.”

She doubts she actually is, but on the other hand if she has to spend her evening talking to anyone, at least he’s safe. At least he probably won’t ask stupid questions about her personal life, like any of the other parents she recognizes here would. Meddling bitches the lot of them, and she doesn’t do blind dates anymore, stopped that long before she had a valid and furry reason to say no, and-

Screw it. Might as well have a little fun as best she can instead of standing on the sidelines with nothing better to think about than how bad powdered lemonade tastes.

“Wanna dance?” she asks, because why the hell not.

“Are we…”

“Look, our job as chaperones is to make sure that nobody spikes the punch and nobody actually has sex on the dance floor. And from where we’re standing right now, we can do neither of those things.”

Whatever other questionably existent people skills this man may have, and she’s getting the feeling that’s a possible problem, at least he knows how to accept when a woman is right. “Good idea. If you’re alright with…”

“I trust you to be a gentleman,” she replies. “Honestly you don’t seem like a danger to womankind.”

He glances away, like there’s some comment he wants to make but isn’t sure she’d get, and then takes her hand. “Lead the way.”

As a general rule, Melissa does not dance. Drunk shenanigans do not count because they are generally not partnered, even if what happens after them decidedly is, and she’s not the most coordinated person to begin with. Unlikely to step on a partner’s feet, but not made for twirling around. It doesn’t help that she’s in a dress in public for the first time in around a decade and wow does that feel awkward right now as she and her counterpart try to find a good spot for observing their shared liabilities. She’s not graceful, not delicate, not anything worth this. And yet…

He, at least, seems to have some idea how to do this. One hand on her shoulder and the other on her waist, like he learned how to dance with a woman from watching old movies and y’know that isn’t the worst possible option here, respectful as can be. “Is this alright?”

“You’re perfect,” she replies, and he is. Being held is nice. She’s missed that. She’s missed…

No. Bad thoughts. Not now, not him.

Their silence is comfortable enough. He knows how to lead and she trusts enough to follow, and if they accidentally end up slow-dancing to something fast, so be it. There is no need to look at him when she’s too busy making sure none of their kids slip out of view, no need to worry what he’s seeing when she knows he’s doing the same. Maybe, if given time, they will evolve like this.

Maybe, if given more time than she realistically thinks they’ll have, they will do much more.

For now, it’s enough to shift her body just a little closer to his and enjoy what’s already here.


End file.
